Thankfully it’s a fascinating, well-written hatchet job from a knowledgeable, well-placed industry figure, and Fletcher is not only completely right about Telstra but convincingly outlines the challenges and opportunities facing both Australians and our telcos.

Maybe the first half seems so interminable because the whole thing is so poorly written. It should be thrilling, but it's as if the publisher has merely retyped clumsy, hastily scrawled journal entries written with no depth or consideration for a reading audience.

At first glance this looks like a polemic against MSN and Twitter, and the author acknowledges as such in the introduction before explaining that he’s talking about deeper issues – essentially, children who grow up selfish because we don’t spend time listening or getting to know them. If only it